Restauration 1815-1849
Assassinations






Assassinations, 1849-1880



In 1866 student Ferdinand Cohen-Blind attempted to assassinate chancellor of Prussia Otto von Bismarck; the attempt failed.
In 1874 cooper apprentice Eduard Kullmann made an attempt to assassinate then-chancellor of Germany Otto von Bismarck; the attempt also failed.
In 1878, two attempts were made to assassinate Kaiser Wilhelm I., the by Emil Hödel, an ex-Social Democrat, the second by Karl Eduard Nobiling, an anarchist; both attempts failed. German chancellor Otto von Bismarck blamed Germany's labour movement and pushed the Sozialistengesetze (Anti-Socialist Laws) through the Reichstag, which banned many organizations associated with the labour movement.
In 1871, in Spain strongman General Prim was assassinated.
Russia in the 1860es and 1870es experienced a wave of assassinations, attributed to the Nihilists, a branch of Anarchism. The most prominent case was the assassination of Czar Alexander II. in 1881, by a man named Rysakoff, member of a group called Narodnaya Volya (People's Will). Earlier attempts to assassinate the Czar had failed in 1866, 1867, 1879. In 1880 a bomb detonated in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.

Not a European event, the assassination of US President Abraham Lincoln in 1865 by John Wilkes Booth falls into the same period.




EXTERNAL
FILES 		Attentat auf Otto von Bismarck, 1874 (Attempt to assassinate Bismarck, 1874), from Preussen-Chronik, in German
Article Nihilism, from Catholic Encyclopedia
Reactions to Reform : The Growth of Opposition under Alexander II, from Active History
People's Will, posted by Geoffrey Michael de Wilde
DOCUMENTS Attentat auf Otto von Bismarck 1874 (Attempt to assassinate Bismarck), from Weltchronik, comment in German
Peter Kropotkin, the Sincerity of the Nihilists, from P. Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 1899
Peter Kropotkin on the Assassination of Alexander II, posted by SHSU, by Resource : World Civilizations
REFERENCE



This page is part of World History at KMLA
First posted on November 1st 2003, last revised on November 16th 2004

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